Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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American Religion: American Enlightenment

Jim Rogers of Texas A&M writes in response to my post on American priestcraft:

[1] The dichotomy, “Enlightenment or evangelical” is a bit too pat for my taste, but then I tend to squint until I see shades of gray in what others see as the most black and white of situations.

[2] On Anglicanism in colonial America: The appointment of an Anglican bishop was a big deal to the colonists, not only for “religious” reasons, but because the colonists feared that it portended English political consolidation over the colonies. (There was a big, big streak of Whiggish paranoia among wide swaths of the colonists - so I don’t know that the reaction to the Bishop’s appointment was justified or not, nonetheless, that, apparently, is how many colonists interpreted the appointment, and so opposed it.)

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American Religion: American priestcraft

Was the American Revolution inspired by the Enlightenment?  Or was it an evangelical Presbyterian rebellion?

One way to get at that would be to examine the rhetoric concerning “priestcraft” in the American revolution. More than forty years ago, Carl Bridenbaugh pointed to the importance of debates about Anglicanism in the American revolution, and perhaps examining those debates could reveal how much the American revolutionaries were indebted to Enlightenment anti-clericalism.

One also notes the anti-priestly rhetoric and impulse that lies behind many of the most characteristically American religious forms, growing out of revivalism.

At the very least, American evangelicalism and European Enlightenment have a common animus toward priestcraft.

American Religion: Pomo Mormons

Ex-Mormon Kenneth Anderson has some pointed things to say about Mormons in the December 24 issue of the Weekly Standard.  He left the Mormons because “I found I could not continue to say I believed in a religion rash enough to make many historical claims, the testability of which was not safely back in the mists of time in the way that protects Christian belief and worldly reason from meeting up to implode like matter and antimatter.”  That’s an odd statement: When Christianity began, after all, its historical claims were current news, with eyewitnesses running excitedly around the Mediterranean world.

Anderson has this insightful thought about Mormons, though: “The usual thing for a Mormon intellectual under such circumstances is to discover the beauty of postmodernism and its flexibility about rationality and empirical truth.”  He adds that he prefers “regular old modernity and the Enlightenment even if they don’t grant me complete freedom to believe seemingly contradictory things.”

Anderson is furious that evangelicals would refuse to vote for Romney solely on the basis of his faith, and aims some blistering curses against them, literal curses.  I’d have to check, but I believe it’s the first time I’ve seen imprecations in a news magazine.

American Religion: Americanism

David Gelernter, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion. New York: Doubleday, 2007. 229 pp. Hardback, $24.95.

America, G. K. Chesterton said, is a nation with the soul of a church. David Gelernter, the polymathic computer scientist from Yale, suggests that this doesn’t quite go far enough.

For many, both within the U.S. and outside, America is a thoroughly religious ideal. It is, Gelernter says, the fourth of the great Western religions. It has its Creed, its sacred history, its saints, its founders and prophets, its mission. America is something to be believed.

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American Religion: Christian America

Rosenstock-Huessy again: He writes that Christian conversion always involves a break with an old way of life, a breach with old loyalties and commitments, and a “verification” of that experience by an induction into a new people, “formerly overlooked or even despised, who now enable us to strengthen experience into habit.” (There’s a bit too much of Weber in that formulation, but leave that to the side.) In a footnote, he adds: “America was practical Christianity as lon as millions of immigrants experienced a change of allegiance from an Old World to a New World, as long as tears shed in the Old World backed up as seed the harvest of joyful experiences in the New.”

American Religion: Innocent abroad

In a recent issue of TNR, Alan Wolfe reviewed David Kuo’s book telling the story of his service in the current Bush administration. Kuo worked in the office of faith-based initiatives, and though he left the administration he still praises Bush because of his Christian testimony. What strikes Wolfe most strongly about Kuo’s book is the man’s unwavering naivete, which, he says, is not evident in Roman Catholics (John DiIulio, for instance) who also served in the Bush administration. Evangelicals are innocents abroad in Washington.

There is something healthy about Kuo’s continuing enthusiasm and his refusal of jadedness, but it is striking that Protestant Evangelicals, who are supposed to have a healthy sense of sin, would be so undiscerning about politicians.

American Religion: RJ Rushdoony’s influence

Reviewing several recent books on the Christian Right in the current issue of First Things, Ross Douthat has this to say about Rushdoony: “What he has instead are the Christian Reconstructionists—the acolytes of the late R.J. Rushdoony—who are genuine theocrats, of a sort, and who also rank somewhere between the Free Mumia movement and the Spartacist Youth League on the totem pole of political influence in America. Yet this doesn’t prevent them from figuring prominently in nearly all the anti-theocrat anthropologies, playing the same role that international communism played for right-wing paranoiacs in the 1950s: the puppet master working from the shadows and the hidden hand behind every secular setback.”

The books Douthat reviews are no doubt expressions of leftist paranoia, but still it seems to me that the leftists have a better sense of Rushdoony’s influence at the grass roots than Douthat does. No doubt no one at the Atlantic, where Douthat works, has been influenced by Rushdoony, but I daresay that if Douthat visited a home school convention, or examined a Christian school curriculum, or talked with a group of Christian political activists, he’d find Rushdoony’s work lurking everywhere, for good and for ill.

American Religion: Religion and Politics

Noah Feldman has a challenging review of Jay Sekulow’s book on the religion of the Supreme Court in the Feb 20 issue of TNR. He argues that the Constitution’s prohibition of religious oaths means a subordination of religious to political conviction: “To move beyond Locke, the Framers had to do more than embrace the idea of a formal distinction between religion and government. They also had to accept the hypothesis that men swearing an oath to support the Constitution would put that duty ahead of any particular commitments entailed by their religious faith. That is why the religious test clause appears immediately after the requirement that every public servant in the country, whether state or federal, must swear or affirm support for the Constitution.”

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American Religion: Exhortation, July 3

America has always been committed to equality; “all men are created equal” is a cornerstone of our founding documents. The promise of America is not that everyone will turn out the same. America promises instead to minimize “artificial” inequities of birth or privilege, and give everyone a chance to pursue his dream on a more or less level playing field. Government will at least refrain from introducing any imbalance that gives an unfair advantage to one class or the other. Americans expect that if the government will only get out of the way, outcomes will be more or less equal. While we can’t all be Bill Gates, we can all retire as millionaires.

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American Religion: Dulles on Jefferson

Now here’s news: A Catholic cardinal putting in a good word for Jefferson’s deism. Avery Cardinal Dulles ends an article in the January 2005 issue of First Things with this: “Jefferson would probably have insisted on the positive articles of deism as a required minimum. For him and the other Founding Fathers, the good of society requires a people who believe in one almighty God, in providence, in a divinely given moral code, in a future life, and in divinely administered rewards and punishments. He and they expected that the example and teachings of Jesus, as known from the Gospels, would be accepted in principle by the great majority of citizens. Although Jefferson wanted the state to refrain from meddling in the particulars of religion, he counted on families, churches, and educational institutions to perpetuate and disseminate in more vivid and concrete forms the basic truths also taught in his modern form of deism.” Faced with serious challenges to the American church-state settlement, we in the early 21st century must confront these challenges “as best we can with the help of the Sage of Monticello.”

Well, no thanks. The problems with Dulles’ position are numerous, but let me mention only one: The notion that maintaining a “required deist minimum” is somehow a way of refraining from “meddling in the particulars of religion.” But how is this the case? Suppose the state gives some aid and comfort to the view that there is “one almighty [non-Triune] God,” is that not a particular of religion? And how is that anything BUT meddling with Trinitarian convictions? Oh, and how can the exhortation that churches and families should “disseminate . . . the basic truths . . . taught in his modern form of deism” anything but a call for churches and families to mute their most fundamental convictions for the greater good of American democracy? To reiterate, no thanks. I think it best to work through church-state questions without expecting much help from Jefferson.

American Religion: Exhortation, July 4

Today we celebrate two hundred and twenty-eight years of American history, and it is a good time to assess, briefly, how we stand as a nation.

Reflecting over the past two centuries, it is obvious that this nation is a strikingly different place than it was after the smoke of the War of Independence had cleared. There have been many, many profound changes, but one of the most historically significant is the role that America has assumed in the world. It is a myth that America has traditionally been isolated from the rest of the world. Through most of our history, we have been willing to protect our interests, particularly business interests, in the rest of the world.

But America?s role has expanded exponentially over the last century. We entered two world wars, and emerged from them to play the key role in the global stalemate with the Soviet Union. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, America has become the world?s only great power. We have become a global empire, with significant military outposts in nearly every sector of the globe.

What are we to make of this as Christians? How should we evaluate American empire? There are many challenging specific questions that need to be addressed. We are citizens of this nation, and bear some responsibility for the way our nation acts around the world. We need to consider realistically how America?s use of power around the world contributes to the backlash that often takes the form of terrorism. We need to challenge the use of air strikes as a leading weapon of war, which in both Kosovo and Afghanistan often resulted in death and suffering for civilians. We need to question the growing influence of the military on the formation and the execution of American foreign policy, and the dangers of a military that exercises autonomous foreign policy decision-making. A cynic would say that American foreign policy is captive to commercial interests, and that we are willing to use military power to crack open markets that would otherwise be closed; and there is much truth in that cynicism. Above all, we as Christians need to recognize that the world order that America is establishing and enforcing, is a false Catholicism, an attempt to establish a single human civilization that is not based on the gospel. America is a global rival to the church.

Important as those issues are, I want to address a broader question. However we evaluate the justice of American actions around the world, we believe that America?s status as the single superpower that towers militarily and economically above all other nations is a result of God?s providential rule of history. Scripture never condemns empire as such, and in fact God prepared the way for the gospel by establishing an imperial system that encompassed the Mediterranean for centuries.

So, in addition to asking about America as Americans, we should be asking how America fits into God?s program for the redemption of creation. We are Americans, and it is right for us to want what is best for our country. But we are Christians first, and our understanding of our moment in history has to be guided by questions about the advance of the kingdom.

For us, the question is not merely, ?Should the US have intervened in Iraq??Ebut also ?Given the fact that we have intervened, what opportunities for the gospel does this present and how can we capitalize on the opportunities that this presents??E Many Christians are asking these questions. During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Franklin Graham and other evangelicals were amassing their own armies in the countries bordering Iraq, ready to start an evangelistic invasion as soon as it was safe. Servant Group International has established Christian classical schools in Kurdistan in Northern Iraq, schools that are training many of the future leaders of Kurdistan, and organizing conferences to train leaders for the Christian Kurds.

We can at least pray for the ministries working in Iraq, and can give money to them. Perhaps the Lord will call some from within this congregation to participate directly in these ministries, as Ian Kern is doing. Basically, the question I want to pose is, What are YOU doing to capitalize on the opportunities that the Lord has given?

American Religion: K. A. Paul

There’s a remarkably huge story on Indian-born evangelist Dr. K. A. Paul, described as the world’s most popular evangelist, in the May 17 issue of The New Republic. The story is weird not only for its length (TNR is not given to reporting on the latest evangelistic trends, much less devoting 4 1/2 pages to it) but also for its tone. Michelle Cottle apparently wants us to be amazed and appalled at Paul’s penchant for spending time with sinners: “Dr. Paul . . . has counseled scores of corrupt political leaders at all levels of government, as well as warlords, rebels, and terrorists from Mumbai to Manila to Mogadishu. By Paul’s estimate, he has gone mano a mano with the leaders of every significant terrorist and rebel group in the 89 countries where his ministry [Global Peace Initiative] operates. Far from being put off by the wickedness of his flock, Paul’s philosophy seems to be: The blacker the soul, the greater the need for redemption. Paul’s aim is to foster global peace, in large part by personally ‘transforming the lives and changing the hearts’ of some of the world’s most ruthless war-mongers.” Paul’s Houston-based ministry also concentrates on assisting the poorest of the poor throughout the world. Cottle’s “story,” such as it is, is Paul’s lack of reputation, fame, and success in America.

Paul seems like a handful ?Eperhaps two or three handfuls; he makes no secret of his successes in dealing with toughs and tyrants (Charles Taylor and Guy Philippe are among the recent ones) and seems a brash fellow to the core. But if he causes concern at TNR, he must be all right.

American Religion: Two Americas

In the Spring 2004 issue of The Public Interest, Joseph Bottum insightfully examines the tensions in “biblical America” between the Enlightenment democratic public order and the fervent religiosity of the people. The tension is original and deep: “Public order in a democracy ?Ethe structure of liberalism that needs a people of virtue to maintain itself ?Eseems to require the bulk of citizens to believe in God. . . . Liberalism needs religion, but religion doesn’t need liberalism. The rhetoric of biblical prophecy would burn the world to the ground if a still, small voice demanded it. . . . And to reap the benefits it needs, a democracy must allow religion to remain the potential trump, the threatened uncontrollable, the possible authority outside a modern state that longs to have no authority outside itself.” In short, “From its founding, the nation has always been something like a school of Enlightenment rationalists aswim in an ocean of Christian faith. And how shall the fish hate the water wherein they live? Or the water hate the fish?” The American dilemma, as Bottum sees it, is how to navigate the tension, without draining the ocean or eliminating the fish: “the question in America was always how to reap the benefit of biblical religion while minimizing the dangers of extra-political authority and a set of citizens called by their deepest beliefs away from any desire to help defend the political order.” Given this situation, “If we lose either our extra-public religion or our Enlightenment use of public religion ?Eif either side in this tension ever entirely vanquishes the other ?Ethe United States will cease to be much of anything at all.”

Bottum’s analysis sharply defines the reality of America, but this analysis also suffers some important limitations. True, losing one or the other side of the tension would mean that America would cease to be what it has always been. But that doesn’t mean it would be nothing. It could simply be a biblical republic. To deny this possibility is to suggest that the Enlightenment order is irreversible; that the secular is simply a fixed realm, rather than, as Milbank has argued, a historically contingent social and political construction. Bottum’s analysis thus seems to be assuming something like the permanence of liberal order.

Bottum goes on to evaluate the recent contributions of Thomas Pangle and Leon Kass to the “quarrel between reason and revelation.” While commending both authors, Bottum offers some incisive criticisms of each. In the last analysis, he argues, Pangle gives the victory to reason; he begins by trying to show how public philosophy needs “the Bible’s thickness to reinvigorate itself” but ends trying to show that the Bible can be illuminated by political philosophy. Kass, too, sees the Bible endorsing “a wisdom that philosophy would recognize.” For Kass, “what the Bible finally does is ease the cruellest edges of the tragic world that Greek literature left us . . . . Kass seems to take biblical wisdom as revealing the human condition to be a sort of mildly mitigated tragedy, and the human heart a kind of cactus bloom.” Intellectuals can do no better than “come up with . . . a useful Bible, the public philosophy side of biblical America. To undo the damage of the secularists, we need to bring the other side of the tension back into balance as well. We need the untamed Bible that forces public philosophy to bend and accommodate.” America, he argues, needs its rational deliberation and its rational compromises, but it cannot be America “unless, underneath it all, a small voice whispers that the nations are as a drop in the bucket and are as counted as the small dust on the balance.”

Amen to almost all of that. Yet, I remain Hauerwasian enough to ask whether Christians need to be concerned with restoring balance and helping America to be America. But Bottum is Hauerwasian enough to know that the church contributes to that balance only accidentally, and that the church will not make its proper contribution if it sees its task as one of making a contribution to the balance of biblical America. The church’s task is no more or less than being the church and proclaiming the untamed Word of the untamed God.

American Religion: American Jesus

In American Jesus, Stephen Prothero traces a three-stage process that produced a uniquely American Jesus. First, Jesus was detached, through the awakenings of the nineteenth century, from the creedal and confessional Calvinism of Puritan America; then, scholars disentangled Jesus from the biblical witness, basing their faith supposedly on Jesus Himself, not on scripture or tradition; finally, Jesus was detached from Christianity itself, so that He could become all things to all Americans. Prothero summarizes: “In From Jesus to Christ (1988), Paula Fredriksen has destribed how the early Church transformed Jesus the man into the Christ of the creeds. In the United States, Americans reversed that process. As they made it possible to reject the Calvinist Christ, the creedal Christ, and the biblical Christ, Jesus became accessible to Americans who could not believe in predestination, the Trinity, or the inerrancy of the Bible. As they disentangled Jesus from Christianity itself, Jesus piety became possible even for non-Christians.” Through the course of his book, Prothero shows how conceptions of Jesus function as a “Rohrschach test” of American mores. He examines several American Jesus styles: the Enlightened sage of Jefferson and the Jesus seminar; the sweet Jesus of Victorian America and liberal Protestantism; the “manly redeemer” of various muscular Christian movements; the countercultural “Jesus Christ Superstar; the Mormon Christ, as well as the black, oriental, and Jewish Jesus. Thus, Prothero characterizes America as a “Jesus nation,” a description that captures both the profound and profoundly Christian religiosity of our nation, as well as the thoroughly heterodox character of that religiosity.

American Religion: Neuhaus on Bush

Richard John Neuhaus wants to defend the theological prowess of our current President, defending his statement that “Muslims worship the same Almighty” as Christians. Neuhaus has some jolly fun at the expense of “official of the Southern Baptist Convention” and the NAE, reducing the arguments to: “we got a competition between gods going here, with our God (upper case) being much nicer than their god, as revealed, so to speak, in the superior niceness of those of us who serve him.” This is, as Neuhaus claims, “theological nonsense.” Neuhaus cites Paul’s words about the “unknown God” in Acts 17 to support his conclusion that “Jews worship the one God whom Jesus called Father” and that “Muslims worth the same God.” This is perfectly good post-Vatican II Roman Catholic theology, and there are doubtless subtle questions at work. But it is odd that Neuhaus deals with this issue without raising the reality of idolatry; he argues as if the claim that ANYONE worships a differnt God is an attack on monotheism. Surely, that there is only one God does not mean everyone who claims to worship him in fact does. Does Neuhaus’s logic work if I happen to call my God “Mammon” instead of “Allah”?

American Religion: Political Religiosity in America

Political religiosity in America is a strange bird, and add journalism to the mix and it approachs mythical proportions. Consider Howard Dean: Yesterday, Drudge was listing a report on Dean’s plan to highlight his religious background as he campaigns in the South. Dean is a Congregationalist who says Jesus has had a significant impact on his life and that he reads the Bible daily. He left the Episcopal church a number of years ago over a local bike path controversy in which the Episcopal church failed to come down on the side of the angels. (If memory serves, it was a bike path controversy that launched the Lollard movement, and the Reformation in Hungary.) Dean’s decision to turn religious just in time for Southern primarily is enough to make the most starry-eyed political novice into a bitter cynic. And Dean is in a no-win position. If he doesn’t act more religious, he’ll continue get criticized for being secular; but if he starts talking about Jesus on the stump, he start looking like an opportunist.

It gets better. The Dec 29/Jan 12 issue of TNR shows up with a cover story by Franklin Foer arguing that Dean’s campaign has been too secular to win a general election, and that he needs a religious narrative to counter Bush’s conversion story. Did Dean have an advance look at the Foer article, and begin early to preempt the criticism? Is Foer a Dean advisor? Or is this just delicious happenstance? Who cares? The carnival of the Presidential campaign is just getting underway, and already it’s providing entertainment like this (yes, that is a Psalm 2 reference). The next 11 months are going to be a hoot.

American Religion: Just War

Christopher Lynch ends a review of several books on just war (Weekly Standard, Nov 3), with the comment that “popular punditry’s now-routine use of the theory and the flood of recent books on the topic suggest that a change in the nation’s thinking has taken place.” Just in time: Since the demands on American power will only increase as the years go by, it’s essential that we have SOME kind of moral framework to deal with those challenges, and the just war theory is the best and most Christian thing we have. Perhaps this is another sign/symptom that the Lord has delivered mastery to America for this period of history, just as He delivered power to Nebuchadnezzar.

American Religion: Turner on ECUSA

Philip Turner, currently Vice President of the Anglican Communion Institute and former Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, has a very incisive article on the current crisis in ECUSA in this month’s edition of First Things. A few quotations:

First, he refers to ECUSA’s effort to fashion itself into a “bridge church” that avoided the rigidity of both American Catholicism and American (fundamentalist) Protestantism. One sign of this was the 1966 decision concerning Bishop James Pike’s claim that the doctrine of the Trinity was not essential to the Christian faith: “The Presiding Bishop of ECUSA, despite pressures to the contrary, wished to avoid a heresy trial and so managed to have the matter referred to an ad hoc committee rather than to a panel of judges. The committee concluded that a heresy trial would be widely viewed as a ‘throwback’ to a previous century in which both church and state sought to penalize ‘unacceptable opinion.’ A trial would thus give ECUSA an ‘oppressive image.’ The members of the committee did say, however, that they rejected the ‘tone and manner’ of the Bishop’s statements, and that they wished to dissociate themselves from many of his comments. Pike’s utterances were ‘irresponsible’ for one holding episcopal office. The bishops then censured Bishop Pike; but, despite the fact that he did not renounce his heresy, they also did nothing to inhibit him in the exercise of his office. It would appear, then, that the Bishop’s fault was a certain degree of irresponsibility and a lack of tact rather than false doctrine.” Even this was too strong for some bishops, who challenged ECUSA to keep step with the times: it is more important to be “a sympathetic and self-conscious part of God’s action in the secular world than it is to defend the positions of the past, which is a past that is altered by each new discovery of truth.”

Second, Turner forcefully argues that ECUSA has become little more than a mirror of the surrounding culture. Citing P.T. Forsythe’s claim that “If within us we have nothing above us we soon succumb to what is around us,” Turner points out that the theology of ECUSA is a “theological projection of a society built upon preference — on in which the inclusion of preference within common life is the be-all and end-all of the social system. ECUSA’s God has become the image of this society. GOne is the notion of divine judgment (save upon those who may wish to exclude someone), gone is the notion of radical conversion, gone is the notion of a way of life that requires dying to self and rising to newness of life in conformity with God’s will. In place of the complex God revealed in Christ Jesus, a God of both judgment and mercy, a God whose law is meant to govern human life, we know have a God who is love and inclusion without remainder. The projected God of the liberal tradition is, in the end, no more than an affirmer of preferences.”

This indictment is all the more effective and powerful coming, as it does, from a life-long Episcopalian.

American Religion: Noll on Edwards

Mark Noll’s account of Edwards’s role in the undermining of the Puritan “sacred canopy” in New England, in his recent book America’s God, is an important analysis of one phase in the rise of American religion. According to Noll, the pattern goes something like this:

1) The Puritans had a unified vision for New England society, one that linked together individual salvation with public institutions of church and state. The dominant metaphor was “covenant.” Individuals were in covenant by regeneration and church membership, and the community as a whole comprised a covenanted community.

2) Edwards’s ecclesiology and sacramental theology broke down this synthesis. The covenant, he believed, was internal, and only those who had internally experienced the covenant of grace could rightly participate in the outward practices of the church. Though Edwards was politically concerned, by internalizing the reality of the covenant he robbed New England of its basic organizing political and social idea, and did not replace it. After Edwards, there was no all-embracing reality that linked God, the individual, the church, and the society.

3) Edwards left a vacuum of public rhetoric and religion, which was filled by concepts of republican virtue. By the revolutionary period, the overarching social and political vision was not formed by biblical teaching or metaphors, but by ideas drawn from political theory — freedom and virtue, the nation as the carrier of divine purposes in the world, and all the other elements of American civil religion.

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